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<메카로 가는 길> 제10장 <다잘(DAJJAL)> 요약
<메디나에서의 대화와 이슬람의 사회관>
저자 무함마드 아사드는 메디나의 유서 깊은 도서관에서 나지드의 저명한 율법학자 압둘라 이븐 불라이히드(Abdullah ibn Bulayhid)를 만난다
예언자 모스크로 자리를 옮긴 아사드는 무함마드의 첫 계시 순간(히라 동굴의 경험)을 회상한다
<다잘의 비유와 현대 물질문명 비판>
저녁 기도 후, 유럽인(파란지)을 처음 본 베두인 청년이 샤이흐에게 그들의 부유함과 신앙의 부재에 대해 질문한다
<개종의 계기와 사회계약으로서의 이슬람>
샤이흐가 개종의 계기를 묻자, 아사드는 몇 달 전 아프가니스탄 힌두쿠시산맥을 지나다 만난 총독(하킴)과의 일화를 회상한다
이후 소련을 거쳐 유럽으로 돌아온 아사드는 엘사(Elsa)와 결혼하고, 프랑크푸르터 차이퉁의 명망 있는 특파원으로서의 자리를 내려놓는다
평론: 영적 파탄에 맞서는 전인적(Holistic) 세계관의 모색
제10장 <다잘>은 저자 레오폴트 바이스(무함마드 아사드)가 서구 지식인에서 무슬림 사상가로 탈바꿈하는 인식론적 결정타를 보여주는 핵심 챕터다. 이 장의 사상적 가치는 종교적 종말론을 사회비판적 메타포로 치환하는 지적 전복성과, 이슬람을 고립된 신앙이 아닌 총체적 '사회 설계도'로 바라보는 문명사적 시각에 있다.
<1. '다잘' 은유의 현대적 전복성>
아사드는 전통 이슬람 종말론에 등장하는 외눈박이 괴물 '다잘'을 20세기 산업 기술문명의 초상으로 전환한다
<2. 이원론을 거부하는 유기적 통합주의>
아사드가 포착한 이슬람의 가장 위대한 미덕은 '육체와 영혼', '세속과 신성'의 이분법을 거부하는 데 있다
<3. 역사적 이상과 당대 현실 사이의 긴장>
본 장에서 아사드는 현실 무슬림 사회의 정체와 퇴행을 결코 미화하지 않는다
결국 <다잘>은 한 개인의 종교적 귀의 과정을 넘어, 물질주의적 파국으로 치닫는 근대 세계에 균형과 전인성을 회복할 대안 문명적 가능성을 묻는 치열한 지적 탐색의 기록이라 평가할 수 있다.
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DAJJAL
-1-
I ENTER THE winding alleys of the oldest part of Medina: house-walls of stone rooted in shadow, bay windows and balconies hanging over lanes that resemble gorges and are so narrow in places that two people can barely pass one another; and find myself before the grey stone facade of the library built about one hundred years ago by a Turkish scholar. In its courtyard, behind the forged bronze grill of the gate, an inviting silence. I cross the stone-flagged yard, past the single tree that stands with motionless branches in its middle, and step into the domed hall lined with glass-covered bookcases - thousands of hand-written books, among them some of the rarest manuscripts known to the Islamic world. It is books like these that have given glory to Islamic culture: a glory that has passed away like the wind of yesterday.
As I look at these books in their tooled-leather covers, the discrepancy between the Muslim Yesterday and Today strikes me like a painful blow...
'What ails thee, my son? Why this bitter look on thy face?'
I turn toward the voice - and behold, sitting on the carpet between one of the bay windows, a folio volume on his knees, the diminutive figure of my old friend, Shaykh Abdullah ibn Bulayhid. His sharp, ironical eyes greet me with a warm flicker as I kiss his forehead and sit down by his side. He is the greatest of all the ulama of Najd and, in spite of a certain doctrinaire narrowness peculiar to the Wahhabi outlook, one of the keenest minds I have ever met in Muslim countries. His friendship for me has contributed greatly to making my life in Arabia easy and pleasant, for in Ibn Saud's kingdom his word counts more than that of any other man except the King himself. He closes his book with a snap and draws me to himself, looking at me inquiringly.
'I was thinking, O Shaykh, how far we Muslims have travelled from this' - and I point toward the books on the shelves - 'to our present misery and degradation.'
'My son,' answers the old man, 'we are but reaping what we have sown. Once we were great: and it was Islam that made us great. We were the bearers of a message. As long as we remained faithful to that message, our hearts were inspired and our minds illumined; but as soon as we forgot for what ends we had been chosen by the Almighty, we fell. We have travelled far away from this' - and the shaykh repeats my gesture toward the books -'because we have travelled far away from what the Prophet - may God bless him and give him peace - taught us thirteen centuries ago...'
'And how goes thy work?' he inquires after a pause; for he knows that I am engaged in studies connected with early Islamic history.
'I must confess, O Shaykh, not very well. I cannot find rest in my heart and do not know why. And so I have taken again to wandering in the desert.'
Ibn Bulayhid looks at me with smilingly squinting eyes - those wise, penetrating eyes - and twirls his henna-dyed beard: "The mind will have its due and the body will have its due... Thou shouldst marry.'
I know, of course, that in Najd marriage is considered to be the solution for almost every sort of perplexity, and so I cannot hold back my laughter:
'But, Shaykh, thou art well aware that I have married again only two years ago, and this year a son has been born to me.'
The old man shrugs his shoulders: 'If a man's heart is at rest with his wife, he stays at home as much as he can. Thou dost not stay that much at home... And, moreover, it has never yet hurt a man to wed a second wife.' (He himself, in spite of his seventy years, has three at present, and I am told that the youngest one, whom he married only a couple of months ago, is barely sixteen years old.)
'It may be,' I rejoin, 'that it doesn't hurt a man to take a second wife; but what of the first wife? Does not her hurt matter as well?'
'My son: if a woman holds the whole of her man's heart, he will not think of, nor need, marrying another. But if his heart is not entirely with her - will she gain anything by keeping him thus half-heartedly to herself alone?'
There is certainly no answer to that. Islam recommends, to be sure, single marriages, but allows a man to marry up to four wives under exceptional circumstances. One might ask why the same latitude has not been given to woman as well; but the answer is simple. Notwithstanding the spiritual fact of love that has entered human life in the course of man's development, the underlying biological reason for the sexual urge is, in both sexes, procreation: and while a woman can, at one time, conceive a child from one man only and has to carry it for nine months before she is able to conceive another, man is so constituted that he may beget a child every time he embraces a woman. Thus, while nature would have been merely wasteful to produce a polygamous instinct in woman, man's undoubted polygamous inclination is, from nature's point of view, biologically justified. It is, of course, obvious that the biological factor is only one - and by no means always the most important - of the aspects of love: none the less, it is a basic factor and, therefore, decisive in the social institution of marriage as such. With the wisdom that always takes human nature fully into account, Islamic Law undertakes no more than the safeguarding of the socio-biological function of marriage (which includes, of course, care for the progeny as well), allowing a man to marry more than one wife and not allowing a woman to have more than one husband at one time; while the spiritual problem of marriage, being imponderable and therefore outside the purview of law, is left to the discretion of the partners. Whenever love is full and complete, the question of another marriage naturally does not arise for either of them; whenever a husband does not love his wife with all his heart but still well enough not to want to lose her, he may take another wife, provided the first one is agreeable to thus sharing his affection; and if she cannot agree to this, she may obtain a divorce and is free to remarry. In any case - since marriage in Islam is not a sacrament but a civil contract - recourse to divorce is always open to either of the marriage partners, the more so as the stigma which elsewhere attaches to divorce with greater or lesser intensity is absent in Muslim society (with the possible exception of the Indian Muslims, who have been influenced in this respect by centuries of contact with Hindu society, in which divorce is utterly forbidden).
The freedom which Islamic Law accords to both men and women to contract or dissolve a marriage explains why it considers adultery one of the most heinous of crimes: for in the face of such latitude, no emotional or sensual entanglement can ever serve as an excuse. It is true that in the centuries of Muslim decline, social custom has often made it difficult for a woman to exercise her prerogative of divorce as freely as the Law-Giver had intended: for this, however, not Islam but custom is to blame - just as custom, and not Islamic Law, is to be blamed for the seclusion in which woman has been kept for so long in so many Muslim countries: for neither in the Koran nor in the life-example of the Prophet do we find any warrant for this practice, which later found its way into Muslim society from Byzantium.
SHAYKH IBN BULAYHID INTERRUPTS my introspection with a knowing look: "There is no need to hurry a decision. It will come to thee, my son, whenever it is to come.'
-2-
THE LIBRARY IS SILENT; the old shaykh and I are alone in the domed room. From a little mosque nearby we hear the call to the sunset prayer; and a moment later the same call reverberates from the five minarets of the Prophet's Mosque which, now invisible to us, watch so solemnly and so full of sweet pride over the green cupola. The mu'azzin on one of the minarets begins his call: Allahu akbar... in a deep, dark, minor key, slowly ascending and descending in long arcs of sound: God is the Greatest, God is the Greatest... Before he has finished this first phrase, the mu'azzin on the minaret nearest us falls in, in a slightly higher tone... the Greatest, God is the Greatest! And while on the third minaret the same chant grows up slowly, the first
mu'azzin has already ended the first verse and begins - now accompanied by the distant contrapuntal sounds of the first phrase from the fourth and fifth minarets - the second verse: I bear witness that there is no God but God! - while the voices from the second and then from the third minaret glide down on soft wings: ... and I bear witness that Muhammad is God's Messenger! In the same way, each verse repeated twice by each of the five mu'azzins, the call proceeds: Come to prayer, come to prayer. Hasten to everlasting happiness! Each of the voices seems to awaken the others and to draw them closer together, only to glide away itself and to take up the melody at another point, thus carrying it to the closing verse: God is the Greatest, God is the Greatest! There is no God but God!
This sonorous, solemn mingling and parting of voices is unlike any other chant of man. And as my heart pounds up to my throat in excited love for this city and its sounds, I begin to feel that all my wanderings have always had but one meaning: to grasp the meaning of this call...
'Come,' says Shaykh Ibn Bulayhid, 'let us go to the mosque for the maghrib prayer.'
THE HARAM, OR HOLY MOSQUE, of Medina was brought into its present shape in the middle of the last century, but parts of it are much older -some dating back to the time of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty and some even earlier. The central hall, which contains the tomb of the Prophet, covers exactly the same ground as the building erected by the third Caliph, Uthman, in the seventh century. Over it rises a large green cupola, adorned on its inner side with colourful ornamental painting. Many rows of heavy marble columns support the roof and harmoniously divide the interior. The marble floor is laid with costly carpets. Exquisitely wrought bronze candelabras flank each of the three mihrabs, semicircular niches oriented toward Mecca and decorated with delicate faience tiles in blue and white: one of them is always the place of the imam who leads the congregation in prayer. On long brass chains hang hundreds of glass and crystal globes; at night they are lighted from within by small lamps that are fed with olive oil and spread a soft shimmer over the rows of praying people. During the day a greenish twilight fills the mosque and makes it resemble the bottom of a lake; as through water human figures glide on bare feet over the carpets and marble slabs; as if separated by walls of water the voice of the imam sounds at the time of prayer from the end of the large hall, muffled and without echo.
The Prophet's tomb itself is invisible, for it is covered with heavy brocade hangings and enclosed by a bronze grill presented in the fifteenth century by the Egyptian Mamluk sultan, Qa'it Bey. In reality, there is no tomb structure as such, for the Prophet was buried under the earthen floor in the very room of the little house in which he lived and died. In later times a doorless wall was built around the house, thus entirely sealing it off from the outer world. During the Prophet's lifetime the mosque was immediately adjacent to his house; in the course of centuries, however, it was extended above and beyond the tomb.
Long rows of rugs are spread over the gravel of the open quadrangle inside the mosque; rows of men crouch on them, reading the Koran, conversing with each other, meditating or simply idling, in anticipation of the sunset prayer. Ibn Bulayhid seems to be lost in a wordless prayer.
From the distance comes a voice reciting, as always before the sunset prayer, a portion of the Holy Book. Today it is the ninety-sixth sura - the first ever revealed to Muhammad - beginning with the words: Read in the name of thy Sustainer... It was in these words that God's call came for the first time to Muhammad in the cave of Hira near Mecca.
He had been praying in solitude, as so often before, praying for light and truth, when suddenly an angel appeared before him and commanded, 'Read!' And Muhammad, who, like most of the people of his environment, had never learned to read and, above all, did not know what it was he was expected to read, answered: 'I cannot read.' Whereupon the angel took him and pressed him to himself so that Muhammad felt all strength leave him; then he released him and repeated his command: 'Read!' And again Muhammad replied: 'I cannot read. Then the angel pressed him again until he became limp and he thought he would die; and once more came the thundering voice: 'Read!' And when, for the third time, Muhammad whispered in his anguish, 'I cannot read...' the angel released him and spoke:
Read in the name of thy Sustainer, Who created - created man from a germ-cell! Read, and thy Sustainer is the most bountiful: He who taught the use of the pen,
Taught man what he knew not...
And thus, with an allusion to man's consciousness, intellect and knowledge, began the revelation of the Koran, which was to continue for twenty-three years until the Prophet's death in Medina at the age of sixty-three.
This story of his first experience of divine revelation reminds one, in some ways, of Jacob's wrestling with the angel as narrated in the Book of Genesis. But whereas Jacob resisted, Muhammad surrendered himself to the angel's embrace with awe and anguish until 'all strength left him' and nothing remained in him but the ability to listen to a voice of which one could no longer say whether it came from without or from within. He did not know yet that henceforth he would have to be full and empty at one and the same time: a human being filled with human urges and desires and the consciousness of his own life and, at the same time, a passive instrument for the reception of a Message. The unseen book of Eternal Truth - the truth that alone gives meaning to all perceptible things and happenings - was being laid bare before his heart, waiting to be understood; and he was told to 'read' out of it to the world so that other men might understand 'what they knew not' and, indeed, could not know by themselves.
The tremendous implications of this vision overwhelmed Muhammad; he, like Moses before the burning bush, thought himself unworthy of the exalted position of prophethood and trembled at the thought that God might have selected him. We are told that he went back to town and to his home and called out to his wife Khadija: 'Wrap me up, wrap me up!'- for he was shaking like a branch in a storm. And she wrapped him up in a blanket, and gradually his trembling subsided. Then he told her what had happened to him, and said: 'Verily, I fear for myself'. But Khadija, with the clearsightedness that only love can give, knew at once that he was afraid of the magnitude of the task before him; and she replied: 'No, by God! Never will He confer a task upon thee which thou art unable to perform, and never will He humiliate thee! For, behold, thou art a good man: thou fulfillest thy duties toward thy kin, and supportest the weak, and bringest gain to the destitute, and art generous toward the guest, and helpest those in genuine distress.' To comfort him, she took her husband to Waraqa, a learned cousin of hers who had been a Christian for many years and, according to tradition, could read the Bible in Hebrew; at that time he was an old man and had become blind. And Khadija said: 'O my uncle's son, hark to this thy kinsman!' And when Muhammad recounted what he had experienced, Waraqa raised his arms in awe and said: 'That was the Angel of Revelation, the same whom God had sent to His earlier prophets. Oh, would I were a young man! Would that I be alive, and able to help thee when thy people drive thee away! Whereupon Muhammad asked in astonishment: 'Why should they drive me away?' And the wise Waraqa replied: 'Yes, they will. Never yet came a man to his people with the like thou hast come with but was persecuted.'
And persecute him they did, for thirteen years, until he forsook Mecca and went to Medina. For the Meccans had always been hard of heart...
BUT, AFTER ALL, IS IT SO difficult to understand the hardness of heart most of the Meccans displayed when they first heard Muhammad's call? Devoid of all spiritual urges, they knew only practical endeavours: for they believed that life could be widened only by widening the means by which outward comfort might be increased. To such people, the thought of having to surrender themselves without compromise to a moral claim - for Islam means, literally, 'self-surrender to God' - may well have seemed unbearable. In addition, the teaching of Muhammad threatened the established order of things and the tribal conventions so dear to the Meccans. When he started preaching the Oneness of God and denounced idol worship as the supreme sin, they saw in it not merely an attack on their traditional beliefs but also an attempt to destroy the social pattern of their lives. In particular, they did not like Islam's interference with what they regarded as purely 'mundane' issues outside the purview of religion - like economics, questions of social equity, and people's behaviour in general - for this interference did not agree too well with their business habits, their licentiousness and their views about the tribal good. To them, religion was a personal matter - a question of attitude rather than of behaviour.
Now this was the exact opposite of what the Arabian Prophet had in mind when he spoke of religion. To him, social practices and institutions came very much within the orbit of religion, and he would surely have been astonished if anyone had told him that religion was a matter of personal conscience alone and had nothing to do with social behaviour. It was this feature of his message that, more than anything else, made it so distasteful to the pagan Meccans. Had it not been for his interference with social problems, their displeasure with the Prophet might well have been less intense. Undoubtedly they would have been annoyed by Islam in so far as its theology conflicted with their own religious views; but most probably they would have put up with it after some initial grumbling - just as they had put up, a little earlier, with the sporadic preaching of Christianity - if only the Prophet had followed the example of the Christian priests and confined himself to exhorting the people to believe in God, to pray to Him for salvation and to behave decently in their personal concerns. But he did not follow the Christian example, and did not confine himself to questions of belief, ritual and personal morality. How could he? Did not his God command him to pray: Our Lord, give us the good of this world as well as the good of the world to come?
In the very structure of this Koranic sentence, 'the good of this world' is made to precede 'the good of the world to come': firstly, because the present precedes the future and, secondly, because man is so constituted that he must seek the satisfaction of his physical, worldly needs before he can listen to the call of the spirit and seek the good of the Hereafter. Muhammad's message did not postulate spirituality as something divorced from or opposed to physical life: it rested entirely on the concept that spirit and flesh are but different aspects of one and the same reality - human life. In the nature of things, therefore, he could not content himself with merely nursing a moral attitude in individual persons but had to aim at translating this attitude into a definite social scheme which would ensure to every member of the community the greatest possible measure of physical and material well-being and, thus, the greatest opportunity for spiritual growth.
He began by telling people that Action is part of faith: for God is not merely concerned with a person's beliefs but also with his or her doings -especially such doings as affect other people besides oneself. He preached, with the most flaming imagery that God had put at his disposal, against the oppression of the weak by the strong. He propounded the unheard-of thesis that men and women were equal before God and that all religious duties and hopes applied to both alike; he even went so far as to declare, to the horror of all right-minded pagan Meccans, that a woman was a person in her own right, and not merely by virtue of her relationship with men as mother, sister, wife or daughter, and that, therefore, she was entitled to own property, to do business on her own and to dispose of her own person in marriage! He condemned all games of chance and all forms of intoxicants, for, in the words of the Koran, Great evil and some advantage is in them, but the evil is greater than the advantage. To top it all, he stood up against the traditional exploitation of man by man; against profits from interest-bearing loans, whatever the rate of interest; against private monopolies and 'corners'; against gambling on other people's potential needs a thing we today call 'speculation'; against judging right or wrong through the lens of tribal group sentiment - in modern parlance, 'nationalism'. Indeed, he denied any moral legitimacy to tribal feelings and considerations. In his eyes, the only legitimate that is, ethically admissible - motive for communal groupment was not the accident of a common origin, but a people's free, conscious acceptance of a common outlook on life and a common scale of moral values.
In effect, the Prophet insisted on a thorough revision of almost all the social concepts which until then had been regarded as immutable, and thus, as one would say today, he 'brought religion into politics': quite a revolutionary innovation in those times.
The rulers of pagan Mecca were convinced, as most people at all times are, that the social conventions, habits of thought and customs in which they had been brought up were the best that could ever be conceived. Naturally, therefore, they resented the Prophet's attempt to bring religion into politics that is, to make God-consciousness the starting point of social change - and condemned it as immoral, seditious and 'opposed to all canons of propriety'. And when it became evident that he was not a mere dreamer but knew how to inspire men to action, the defenders of the established order resorted to vigorous counteraction and began to persecute him and his followers...
In one way or another, all prophets have challenged the 'established order' of their times; is it therefore so surprising that almost all of them were persecuted and ridiculed by their kinsfolk? - and that the latest of them, Muhammad, is ridiculed in the West to this day?
-3-
AS SOON AS the maghrib prayer is over, Shaykh Ibn Bulayhid becomes the centre of an attentive circle of Najdi beduins and townsmen desirous of profiting from his learning and world-wisdom; while he himself is always eager to hear what people can tell him of their experiences and travels in distant parts. Long travels are nothing uncommon among the Najdis; they call themselves ahl ash-shidād - 'people of the camel-saddle' - and to many of them the camel-saddle is indeed more familiar than a bed at home. It must certainly be more familiar to the young Harb beduin who has just finished recounting to the shaykh what befell him on his recent journey to Iraq, where he has seen, for the first time, faranji people - that is, Europeans (who owe this designation to the Franks with whom the Arabs came in contact during the Crusades).
'Tell me, O Shaykh, why is it that the faranjis always wear hats that shade their eyes? How can they see the sky?'
'That is just what they do not want to see,' replies the shaykh, with a twinkle in my direction. 'Perhaps they are afraid lest the sight of the heavens remind them of God; and they do not want to be reminded of God on weekdays...'
We all laugh, but the young beduin is persistent in his search for knowledge. "Then why is it that God is so bountiful toward them and gives them riches that He denies to the Faithful?'
'Oh, that is simple, my son. They worship gold, and so their deity is in their pockets... But my friend here,'- and he places his hand on my knee - 'knows more about the faranjis than I do, for he comes from among them: God, glorified be His name, has led him out of that darkness into the light of Islam.'
'Is that so, O brother?' asks the eager young beduin. 'Is it true that thou hast been a faranji thyself? '- and when I nod, he whispers, 'Praise be unto God, praise be unto God, who guides aright whomsoever He wishes... Tell me, brother, why is it that the faranjis are so unmindful of God?'
'That is a long story,' I reply, 'and cannot be explained in a few words. All that I can tell thee now is that the world of the faranjis has become the world of the Dajjal, the Glittering, the Deceptive One. Hast thou ever heard of our Holy Prophet's prediction that in later times most of the world's people would follow the Dajjal, believing him to be God?'
=And as he looks at me with a question in his eyes, I recount, to the visible approval of Shaykh Ibn Bulayhid, the prophecy about the appearance of that apocalyptic being, the Dajjal, who would be blind in one eye but endowed with mysterious powers conferred upon him by God. He would hear with his ears what is spoken in the farthest corners of the earth, and would see with his one eye things that are happening in infinite distances; he would fly around the earth in days, would make treasures of gold and silver suddenly appear from under ground, would cause rain to fall and plants to grow at his command, would kill and bring to life again: so that all whose faith is weak would believe him to be God Himself and would prostrate themselves before him in adoration. But those whose faith is strong would read what is written in letters of flame on his forehead: Denier of God - and thus they would know that he is but a deception to test man's faith...
And while my beduin friend looks at me with wide-open eyes and murmurs, 'I take my refuge with God,' I turn to Ibn Bulayhid:
'Is not this parable, O Shaykh, a fitting description of modern technical civilization? It is "one-eyed": that is, it looks upon only one side of life material progress and is unaware of its spiritual side. With the help of its mechanical marvels it enables man to see and hear far beyond his natural ability, and to cover endless distances at an inconceivable speed. Its scientific knowledge causes "rain to fall and plants to grow" and uncovers unsuspected treasures from beneath the ground. Its medicine brings life to those who seem to have been doomed to death, while its wars and scientific horrors destroy life. And its material advancement is so powerful and so glittering that the weak in faith are coming to believe that it is a godhead in its own right; but those who have remained conscious of their Creator clearly recognize that to worship the Dajjal means to deny God...'
"Thou art right, O Muhammad, thou art right!' cries out Ibn Bulayhid, excitedly striking my knee. 'It has never occurred to me to look upon the Dajjal prophecy in this light; but thou art right! Instead of realizing that man's advancement and the progress of science is a bounty from our Lord, more and more people in their folly are beginning to think that it is an end in itself and fit to be worshipped.'
YES, I THINK TO MYSELF, Western man has truly given himself up to the worship of the Dajjal. He has long ago lost all innocence, all inner integration with nature. Life has become a puzzle to him. He is sceptical, and therefore isolated from his brother and lonely within himself. In order not to perish in this loneliness, he must endeavour to dominate life by outward means. The fact of being alive can, by itself, no longer give him inner security: he must always wrestle for it, with pain, from moment to new moment. Because he has lost all metaphysical orientation, and has decided to do without it, he must continuously invent for himself mechanical allies: and thus the furious, desperate drive of his technique. He invents every day new machines and gives each of them something of his soul to make them fight for his existence. That they do indeed; but at the same time they create for him ever new needs, new dangers, new fears and an unquenchable thirst for newer, yet artificial allies. His soul loses itself in the ever bolder, ever more fantastic, ever more powerful wheelwork of the creative machine: and the machine loses its true purpose to be a protector and enricher of human life - and evolves into a deity in its own right, a devouring Moloch of steel. The priests and preachers of this insatiable deity do not seem to be aware that the rapidity of modern technical progress is a result not only of a positive growth of knowledge but also of spiritual despair, and that the grand material achievements in the light of which Western man proclaims his will to attain to mastery over nature are, in their innermost, of a defensive character: behind their shining facades lurks the fear of the Unknown.
Western civilization has not been able to strike a harmonious balance between man's bodily and social needs and his spiritual cravings; it has abandoned its erstwhile religious ethics without being able to produce out of itself any other moral system, however theoretical, that would commend itself to reason. Despite all its advances in education, it has not been able to overcome man's stupid readiness to fall a prey to any slogan, however absurd, which clever demagogues think fit to invent. It has raised the technique of 'organization' to a fine art - and nevertheless the nations of the West daily demonstrate their utter inability to control the forces which their scientists have brought into being, and have now reached a stage where apparently unbounded scientific possibilities go hand in hand with world-wide chaos. Lacking all truly religious orientation, the Westerner cannot morally benefit by the light of the knowledge which his undoubtedly great - science is shedding. To him might be applied the words of the Koran:
Their parable is the parable of people who lit a fire: but when it had shed its light around them, God took away their light and left them in darkness in which they cannot see - deaf, dumb, blind: and yet they do not turn back.
And yet, in the arrogance of their blindness, the people of the West are convinced that it is their civilization that will bring light and happiness to the world... In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they thought of spreading the gospel of Christianity all over the world; but now that their religious ardour has cooled so much that they consider religion no more than soothing background music allowed to accompany, but not to influence, 'real' life - they have begun to spread instead the materialistic gospel of the 'Western way of life': the belief that all human problems can be solved in factories, laboratories and on the desks of statisticians.
And thus the Dajjal has come into his own...
FOR A LONG TIME there is silence. Then the shaykh speaks again: 'Was it the realization of what the Dajjal means that made thee embrace Islam, O my son?'
'In a way, I think, it must have been; but it was only the last step.'
'The last step... Yes: thou hast told me once the story of thy way to Islam - but when and how, exactly, did it first dawn upon thee that Islam might be thy goal?'
'When? Let me see... I think it was on a winter day in Afghanistan, when my horse lost a shoe and I had to seek out a smith in a village that lay off my path; and there a man told me, "But thou art a Muslim, only thou dost not know it thyself..." That was about eight months before I embraced Islam... I was on my way from Herat to Kabul...'
I WAS ON MY WAY from Herat to Kabul and was riding, accompanied by Ibrahim and an Afghan trooper, through the snow-buried mountain valleys and passes of the Hindu-Kush, in central Afghanistan. It was cold and the snow was glistening and on all sides stood steep mountains in black and white.
I was sad and, at the same time, strangely happy that day. I was sad because the people with whom I had been living during the past few months seemed to be separated by opaque veils from the light and the strength and the growth which their faith could have given them; and I was happy because the light and the strength and the growth of that faith stood as near before my eyes as the black and white mountains - almost to be touched with the hand..
My horse began to limp and something clinked at its hoof: an iron shoe had become loose and was hanging only by two nails.
'Is there a village nearby where we could find a smith?' I asked our Afghan companion.
"The village of Deh-Zangi is less than a league away. There is a blacksmith there and the hakim of the Hazarajat has his castle there.'
And so to Deh-Zangi we rode over glistening snow, slowly, so as not to tire my horse.
The hakim, or district governor, was a young man of short stature and gay countenance - a friendly man who was glad to have a foreign guest in the loneliness of his modest castle. Though a close relative of King Amanullah, he was one of the most unassuming men I had met or was ever to meet in Afghanistan. He forced me to stay with him for two days.
In the evening of the second day we sat down as usual to an opulent dinner, and afterward a man from the village entertained us with ballads sung to the accompaniment of a three-stringed lute. He sang in Pashtu - a language which I did not understand - but some of the Persian words he used sprang up vividly against the background of the warm, carpeted room and the cold gleam of snow that came through the windows. He sang, I remember, of David's fight with Goliath of the fight of faith against brute power - and although I could not quite follow the words of the song, its theme was clear to me as it began in humility, then rose in a violent ascent of passion to a final, triumphant outcry.
When it ended, the hakim remarked: 'David was small, but his faith was great...'
I could not prevent myself from adding: 'And you are many, but your faith is small.'
My host looked at me with astonishment, and, embarrassed by what I had almost involuntarily said, I rapidly began to explain myself. My explanation took the shape of a torrent of questions:
'How has it come about that you Muslims have lost your self-confidence - that self-confidence which once enabled you to spread your faith, in less than a hundred years, from Arabia westward as far as the Atlantic and eastward deep into China - and now surrender yourselves so easily, so weakly, to the thoughts and customs of the West? Why can't you, whose forefathers illumined the world with science and art at a time when Europe lay in deep barbarism and ignorance, summon forth the courage to go back to your own progressive, radiant faith? How is it that Ataturk, that petty masquerader who denies all value to Islam, has become to you Muslims a symbol of "Muslim revival"?'
My host remained speechless. It had started to snow outside. Again I felt that wave of mingled sadness and happiness that I had felt on approaching Deh-Zangi. I sensed the glory that had been and the shame that was enveloping these late sons of a great civilization.
'Tell me - how has it come about that the faith of your Prophet and all its clearness and simplicity has been buried beneath a rubble of sterile speculation and the hair-splitting of your scholastics? How has it happened that your princes and great land-owners revel in wealth and luxury while so many of their Muslim brethren subsist in unspeakable poverty and squalour - although your Prophet taught that No one may call himself a Faithful who eats his fill while his neighbour remains hungry? Can you make me understand why you have brushed woman into the background of your lives -although the women around the Prophet and his Companions took part in so grand a manner in the life of their men? How has it come about that so many of you Muslims are ignorant and so few can even read and write - although your Prophet declared that Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman and that The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars?'
Still my host stared at me without speaking, and I began to think that my outburst had deeply offended him. The man with the lute, not understanding Persian well enough to follow me, looked on in wonderment at the sight of the stranger who spoke with so much passion to the hakim. In the end, the latter pulled his wide yellow sheepskin cloak closer about himself, as if feeling cold; then he whispered:
'But you are a Muslim...'
I laughed, and replied: 'No, I am not a Muslim, but I have come to see so much beauty in Islam that it makes me sometimes angry to watch you people waste it... Forgive me if I have spoken harshly. I did not speak as an enemy.'
But my host shook his head. 'No, it is as I have said: you are a Muslim, only you don't know it yourself... Why don't you say, now and here, "There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet" and become a Muslim in fact, as you already are in your heart? Say it brother, say it now, and I will go with you tomorrow to Kabul and take you to the amir, and he will receive you with open arms as one of us. He will give you houses and gardens and cattle, and we all will love you. Say it, my brother...'
'If I ever do say it, it will be because my mind has been set at rest and not for the sake of the amir's houses and gardens.'
'But,' he insisted, 'you already know far more about Islam than most of us; what is it that you have not yet understood?'
'It is not a question of understanding. It is rather a question of being convinced: convinced that the Koran is really the word of God and not
merely the brilliant creation of a great human mind...'
But the words of my Afghan friend never really left me in the months that followed.
From Kabul I rode for weeks through southern Afghanistan - through the ancient city of Ghazni, from which nearly a thousand years ago the great Mahmud set out on his conquest of India; through exotic Kandahar, where you could see the fiercest warrior-tribesmen in all the world; across the deserts of Afghanistan's southwestern corner; and back to Herat, where my Afghan trek had started.
It was in 1926, toward the end of the winter, that I left Herat on the first stage of my long homeward journey, which was to take me by train from the Afghan border to Marv in Russian Turkestan, to Samarkand, Bokhara and Tashkent, and thence across the Turkoman steppes to the Urals and Moscow.
My first (and most lasting) impression of Soviet Russia - at the railway station of Marv - was a huge, beautifully executed poster which depicted a young proletarian in blue overalls booting a ridiculous, white-bearded gentleman, clad in flowing robes, out of a cloud-filled sky. The Russian legend beneath the poster read: 'Thus have the workers of the Soviet Union kicked God out of his heaven! Issued by the Bezbozhniki (Godless) Association of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.'
Such officially sanctioned antireligious propaganda obtruded itself everywhere one went: in public buildings, in the streets and, preferably, in the vicinity of houses of worship. In Turkestan these were, naturally, for the most part mosques. While prayer congregations were not explicitly forbidden, the authorities did everything to deter people from attending them. I was often told, especially in Bokhara and Tashkent, that police spies would take down the name of every person who entered a mosque; copies of the Koran were being impounded and destroyed; and a favourite pastime of the young bezbozhniki was to throw heads of pigs in-to mosques; a truly charming custom.
It was with a feeling of relief that I crossed the Polish frontier after weeks of journeying through Asiatic and European Russia. I went straight to Frankfurt and made my appearance in the now familiar precincts of my newspaper. It did not take me long to find out that during my absence my name had become famous, and that I was now considered one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of Central Europe. Some of my articles - especially those dealing with the intricate religious psychology of the Iranians - had come to the attention of prominent orientalist scholars and received a more than passing recognition. On the strength of this achievement, I was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the Academy of Geopolitics in Berlin - where I was told that it had never happened before that a man of my age (I was not yet twenty-six) had been accorded such a distinction. Other articles of more general interest had been reproduced, with the permission of the Frankfurter Zeitung, by many other newspapers; one article, I learned, had been reprinted nearly thirty times. All in all, my Iranian wanderings had been extremely fruitful...
IT WAS AT THIS TIME that I married Elsa. The two years I had been away from Europe had not weakened our love but rather strengthened it, and it was with a happiness I had never felt before that I brushed aside her apprehensions about the great difference in our ages.
='But how can you marry me?' she argued. 'You are not yet twenty-six, and I am over forty. Think of it: when you will be thirty, I will be forty-five; and when you will be forty, I will be an old woman...'
I laughed: 'What does it matter? I cannot imagine a future without you.'
And finally she gave in.
I did not exaggerate when I said that I could not imagine a future without Elsa. Her beauty and her instinctive grace made her so utterly attractive to me that I could not even look at any other woman; and her sensitive understanding of what I wanted of life illumined my own hopes and desires and made them more concrete, more graspable than my own thinking could ever have done.
On one occasion - it must have been about a week after we had been married she remarked: 'How strange that you, of all people, should depreciate mysticism in religion... You are a mystic yourself - a sensuous kind of mystic, reaching out with your fingertips toward the life around you, seeing an intricate, mystical pattern in everyday things - in many things that to other people appear so commonplace... But the moment you turn to religion, you are all brain. With most people it would be the other way around...'
But Elsa was not really puzzled. She knew what I was searching for when I spoke to her of Islam; and although she may not have felt the same urgency as I did, her love made her share my quest.
Often we would read the Koran together and discuss its ideas; and Elsa, like myself, became more and more impressed by the inner cohesion between its moral teaching and its practical guidance. According to the Koran, God did not call for blind subservience on the part of man but rather appealed to his intellect; He did not stand apart from man's destiny but was nearer to you than the vein in your neck; He did not draw any dividing line between faith and social behaviour; and, what was perhaps most important, He did not start from the axiom that all life was burdened with a conflict between matter and spirit and that the way toward the Light demanded a freeing of the soul from the shackles of the flesh. Every form of life-denial and self-mortification had been condemned by the Prophet in sayings like Be-hold, asceticism is not for us, and There is no world-renunciation in Islam. The human will to live was not only recognized as a positive, fruitful instinct but was endowed with the sanctity of an ethical postulate as well. Man was taught, in effect: You not only may utilize your life to the full, but you are obliged to do so.
An integrated image of Islam was now emerging with a finality, a decisiveness that sometimes astounded me. It was taking shape by a process that could almost be described as a kind of mental osmosis - that is, without any conscious effort on my part to piece together and 'systematize' the many fragments of knowledge that had come my way during the past four years. I saw before me something like a perfect work of architecture, with all its elements harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other, with nothing superfluous and nothing lacking - a balance and composure which gave one the feeling that everything in the outlook and postulates of Islam was 'in its proper place'.
Thirteen centuries ago a man had stood up and said: 'I am only a mortal man; but He who has created the universe has bidden me to bear His Message to you. In order that you might live in harmony with the plan of His creation, He has commanded me to remind you of His existence, omnipotence and omniscience, and to place before you a programme of behaviour. If you accept this reminder and this programme, follow me.' This was the essence of Muhammad's prophetic mission.
The social scheme he propounded was of that simplicity which goes together only with real grandeur. It started from the premise that men are biological beings with biological needs and are so conditioned by their Creator that they must live in groups in order to satisfy the full range of their physical, moral and intellectual requirements: in short, they are dependent on one another. The continuity of an individual's rise in spiritual stature (the fundamental objective of every religion) depends on whether he is helped, encouraged and protected by the people around him who, of course, expect the same co-operation from him. This human interdependence was the reason why in Islam religion could not be separated from economics and politics. To arrange practical human relations in such a way that every individual might find as few obstacles and as much encouragement as possible in the development of his personality: this, and nothing else, appeared to be the Islamic concept of the true function of society. And so it was only natural that the system which the Prophet Muhammad enunciated in the twenty-three years of his ministry related not only to matters spiritual but provided a framework for all individual and social activity as well. It held out the concept not only of individual righteousness but also of the equitable society which such righteousness should bring about. It provided the outline of a political community - the outline only, because the details of man's political needs are time-bound and therefore variable - as well as a scheme of individual rights and social duties in which the fact of historical evolution was duly anticipated. The Islamic code embraced life in all its aspects, moral and physical, individual and communal; problems of the flesh and of the mind, of sex and economics had, side by side with problems of theology and worship, their legitimate place in the Prophet's teachings, and nothing that pertained to life seemed too trivial to be drawn into the orbit of religious thought - not even such 'mundane' issues as commerce, inheritance, property rights or ownership of land...
All the clauses of Islamic Law were devised for the equal benefit of all members of the community, without distinction of birth, race, sex or previous social allegiance. No special benefits were reserved for the community's founder or his descendants. High and low were, in a social sense, nonexistent terms; and nonexistent was the concept of class. All rights, duties and opportunities applied equally to all who professed faith in Islam. No priest was required to mediate between man and God, for He knows what lies open in their hands before them and what they conceal behind their backs. No loyalty was recognized beyond the loyalty to God and His Prophet, to one's parents, and to the community that had as its goal the establishment of God's kingdom on earth; and this precluded that kind of loyalty which says, 'right or wrong, my country' or 'my nation'. To elucidate this principle, the Prophet very pointedly said on more than one occasion: He is not of us who proclaims the cause of tribal partisanship; and he is not of us who fights in the cause of tribal partisanship; and he is not of us who dies for the sake of tribal partisanship.
Before Islam, all political organizations - even those on a theocratic or semi-theocratic basis - had been limited by the narrow concepts of tribe and tribal homogeneity. Thus, the god-kings of ancient Egypt had no thought beyond the horizon of the Nile valley and its inhabitants, and in the early theocratic state of the Hebrews, when God was supposed to rule, it was necessarily the God of the Children of Israel. In the structure of Koranic thought, on the other hand, considerations of descent or tribal adherence had no place. Islam postulated a self-contained political community which cut across the conventional divisions of tribe and race. In this respect, Islam and Christianity might be said to have had the same aim: both advocated an international community of people united by their adherence to a common ideal; but whereas Christianity had contented itself with a mere moral advocacy of this principle and, by advising its followers to give Caesar his due, had restricted its universal appeal to the spiritual sphere, Islam unfolded before the world the vision of a political organization in which God-consciousness would be the mainspring of man's practical behaviour and the sole basis of all social institutions. Thus - fulfilling what Christianity had left unfulfilled - Islam inaugurated a new chapter in the development of man: the first instance of an open, ideological society in contrast with the closed, racially or geographically limited, societies of the past.
The message of Islam envisaged and brought to life a civilization in which there was no room for nationalism, no 'vested interests', no class divisions, no Church, no priesthood, no hereditary nobility; in fact, no hereditary functions at all. The aim was to establish a theocracy with regard to God and a democracy between man and man. The most important feature of that new civilization - a feature which set it entirely apart from all other movements in human history - was the fact that it had been conceived in terms of, and arose from, a voluntary agreement of the people concerned. Here, social progress was not, as in all other communities and civilizations known to history, a result of pressure and counterpressure of conflicting
interests, but part and parcel of an original 'constitution'. In other words, a genuine social contract lay at the root of things: not as a figure of speech formulated by later generations of power-holders in defence of their privileges, but as the real, historic source of Islamic civilization. The Koran said: Behold, God has bought of the Faithful their persons and their possessions, offering them Paradise in return... Rejoice, then, in the bargain you have made, for this is the triumph supreme.
I knew that this 'triumph supreme' - the one instance of a real social contract recorded by history - was realized only during a very short period; or, rather, only during a very short period was a large-scale attempt made to realize it. Less than a century after the Prophet's death, the political form of pristine Islam began to be corrupted and, in the following centuries, the original programme was gradually pushed into the background. Clannish wranglings for power took the place of a free agreement of free men and women; hereditary kingship, as inimical to the political concept of Islam as polytheism is to its theological concept, soon came into being - and with it, dynastic struggles and intrigues, tribal preferences and oppressions, and the usual degradation of religion to the status of a handmaiden of political power: in short, the entire host of 'vested interests' so well known to history. For a time, the great thinkers of Islam tried to keep its true ideology aloft and pure; but those who came after them were of lesser stature and lapsed after two or three centuries into a morass of intellectual convention, ceased to think for themselves and became content to repeat the dead phrases of earlier generations - forgetting that every human opinion is time-bound and fallible and therefore in need of eternal renewal. The original impetus of Islam, so tremendous in its beginnings, sufficed for a while to carry the Muslim commonwealth to great cultural heights - to that splendid vision of scientific, literary and artistic achievement which historians describe as the Golden Age of Islam; but within a few more centuries this impetus also died down for want of spiritual nourishment, and Muslim civilization became more and more stagnant and devoid of creative power.
I HAD NO ILLUSIONS as to the present state of affairs in the Muslim world. The four years I had spent in those countries had shown me that while Islam was still alive, perceptible in the world-view of its adherents and in their silent admission of its ethical premises, they themselves were like people paralyzed, unable to translate their beliefs into fruitful action. But what concerned me more than the failure of present-day Muslims to implement the scheme of Islam were the potentialities of that scheme itself. It was sufficient for me to know that for a short time, quite at the beginning of Islamic history, a successful attempt had been made to translate that scheme into practice; and what had seemed possible at one time might perhaps become really possible at another. What did it matter, I told myself, that the Muslims had gone astray from the original teaching and subsided into indolence and ignorance? What did it matter that they did not live up to the ideal placed before them by the Arabian Prophet thirteen centuries ago - if the ideal itself still lay open to all who were willing to listen to its message?
And it might well be, I thought, that we latecomers needed that message even more desperately than did the people of Muhammad's time. They lived in an environment much simpler than ours, and so their problems and difficulties had been much easier of solution. The world in which I was living the whole of it was wobbling because of the absence of any agreement as to what is good and evil spiritually and, therefore, socially and economically as well. I did not believe that individual man was in need of 'salvation': but I did believe that modern society was in need of salvation. More than any previous time, I felt with mounting certainty, this time of ours was in need of an ideological basis for a new social contract: it needed a faith that would make us understand the hollowness of material progress for the sake of progress alone - and nevertheless would give the life of this world its due; that would show us how to strike a balance between our spiritual and physical requirements: and thus save us from the disaster into which we were rushing headlong.
IT WOULD NOT BE too much to say that at this period of my life the problem of Islam for it was a problem to me occupied my mind to the exclusion of everything else. By now my absorption had outgrown its initial stages, when it had been no more than an intellectual interest in a strange, if attractive, ideology and culture: it had become a passionate search for truth. Compared with this search, even the adventurous excitement of the last two years of travel paled into insignificance: so much so that it became difficult for me to concentrate on writing the new book which the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung was entitled to expect of me.
At first Dr Simon viewed indulgently my obvious reluctance to proceed with this book. After all, I had just returned from a long journey and deserved some sort of holiday; my recent marriage seemed also to warrant a respite from the routine of writing. But when the holiday and the respite began to extend beyond what Dr Simon regarded as reasonable, he suggested that I should now come down to earth.
In retrospect, it seems to me that he was very understanding; but it did not seem so at the time. His frequent and urgent inquiries about the progress of 'the book' had an effect contrary to what he intended: I felt myself unduly imposed upon; and I began to detest the very thought of the book. I was more concerned with what I had still to discover than with describing what I had found so far.
In the end, Dr Simon made the exasperated observation: 'I don't think you will ever write this book. What you are suffering from is horror libri.' Somewhat nettled, I replied: 'Maybe my disease is even more serious than that. Perhaps I am suffering from horror scribendi.'
'Well, if you're suffering from that,' he retorted sharply, 'do you think the Frankfurter Zeitung is the proper place for you?'
One word led to another and our disagreement grew into a quarrel. On the same day I resigned from the Frankfurter Zeitung and a week later left with Elsa for Berlin.
I did not, of course, intend to give up journalism, for, apart from the comfortable livelihood and the pleasure (temporarily marred by 'the book') which writing gave me, it provided me with my only means of returning to the Muslim world: and to the Muslim world I wanted to return at any cost. But with the reputation I had achieved over the past four years, it was not difficult to make new press connections. Very soon after my break with Frankfurt, I concluded highly satisfactory agreements nents with three other newspapers: the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of Zurich, the Telegraaf of Amsterdam and the Kölnische Zeitung of Cologne. From now on my articles on the Middle East were to be syndicated by these three newspapers, which - though perhaps not comparable with the Frankfurter Zeitung - were among the most important in Europe.
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